Existential threats to humanity intermingle with gamer action and a creepy mystery

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Westworld is unlike anything you’ve seen before on television, and I don’t mean that in the sense of visual effects. The series takes two familiar sci-fi tropes—out-of-control robots and immersive gameworlds gone wrong—and builds a complex, plausible futuristic scenario around them. As a result, we get a rich, disturbing, intense story about how the evolution of storytelling is bound up with the birth of artificial life.

The new HBO series, debuting Oct. 2, is about an enormous wild west amusement park populated by robots indistinguishable from real people. Human "guests" can do whatever they want with the robot "hosts." Though it's not clear how far in the future the series is set, we do know that the park has been in operation for at least 30 years, during which time the robots have evolved from simple machines with small repertoires of phrases, into fully-interactive creatures who can learn, adapt, and even dream. Westworld, which looks like Monument Valley, is so big that even experienced players have never found its edges. The park's creator, Ford (Anthony Hopkins), is a roboticist with a serious Messiah complex who has secret plans for the park. Ford works closely with lead programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), who also seems to have some off-the-books plans for the robots--he's been secretly analyzing the code running beautiful, kindly robot Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) during creepy late-night hacking sessions.

As the series opens, Ford has just released a software update that nobody realized was coming. The update is called "reverie," and it gives the robots a new set of gestures that make them appear to be staring off into space and dreaming. Though it adds to the robots' realism, it also has some unexplained side-effects that cause the robots to crash. So Bernard and his team, along with an ops crew led by Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and security chief Ashley (Luke Hemsworth), have to come in and clean up the mess. Of course it's not going to be easy, because Ford's update was a lot more than it seems. And it appears to be spreading like an intellectual virus from robot to robot.

Further Reading

Westworld’s appeal comes from its intricate worldbuilding: it’s a game within a game in every possible sense. The robots are part of an immersive story that combines over 200 narratives in the massive park—but there’s also a hidden narrative, a secret story that only the most sophisticated player will ever find. Ed Harris plays the terrifying Man in Black, a wealthy gamer who has been coming to Westworld since it opened, trying to gain access to the secret story, raping and pillaging along the way. As we watch the gaming get more insane, we're brought behind the scenes into the internecine workplace politics between the programmers, writers, and corporate investors who make the park run. So each episode of Westworld operates on three levels: the game, the gamers, and the game designers. And these levels have become entangled in some pretty disturbing ways.

Based on a 1973 movie written by Michael Crichton, the series takes the movie’s original concept to places that were impossible before the age of video games and home robots. What the series shares with the film is a sleek, organic 1970s future design and camera style. What we see of the world outside the park, in areas reserved for robot development and repair, are rounded edges and transparent surfaces that seem to stretch to infinity. It's like an Apple store gone darkside. Indeed, there's a lot of darkside in this series, and some of that comes from the Crichton film too. In the movie, we're constantly reminded that our rich protagonists have shelled out a ton of money to shoot robots who look exactly like people.

Haunting both the movie and the new series is the question of whether we should really be selling violence as entertainment. Partly that's a moral question, and partly it's sheer logistics. After all, if we build a world indistinguishable from our own and start killing or abusing everyone in it, won't something eventually go wrong? Answering those questions is the obsession of this series, especially when it becomes clear that some of the main characters are going to be robots. Kindly Dolores and tart robot madame Maeve (Thandie Newton) are key point-of-view characters, along with many doomed gunslingers, who offer us a perspective on what it's like to live in an endlessly repeating narrative where your agony is someone else's joyride.

Further Reading

One of the concerns raised in some early reviews of the series has been its extreme violence. If you were to measure its violence in some kind of scene-by-scene tally, Westworld is probably less violent than other HBO series like Game of Thrones and True Blood. But its shootouts are a lot more disturbing, because they're not presented as the result of extreme circumstances or desperate times. Every violent act we see is something that a person chooses to do for fun, out of sadism or desire for bloodsport. Nobody has to die in the theme park of Westworld, but the narrative department (run by the delightfully unctuous Simon Quarterman as Lee) has built murder into the structure of the game. The human hosts are issued guns when they enter the park. Though the guns can only kill robots, the results are horrifying precisely because this is violence for its own sake. Enjoying the bloody action in Westworld invites you to question why violence is considered "fun." And that makes it a lot harder to take.

Possibly the most intriguing element of Westworld, however, is how much the series is a perfect alloy of science fiction and western. These are two genres that share a lot in common, but are rarely hybridized to good effect, Firefly notwithstanding. I think the combination works so well here because Westworld is as much about the future of gaming and storytelling as it is about robots. We get to watch Bernard, Lee, and their team of programmer-writers use incredible new technologies, from robots to AI, to retell key aspects of US history. The result is a story that is both a western and a story about making westerns. And because the robot characters in the story are essentially alive, those questions about violent entertainment become even more urgent. Why would we force living beings to reenact our own violent histories? Why did our ancestors force living beings to go through that violent history in the first place?

Westworld is a series about history as much as it is about the future. Perhaps more importantly, it's about how we remember history in stories—and why that matters. No surprise that this show is operating on so many levels, because it was created by Person of Interest producer Jonathan Nolan and writer Lisa Joy (Burn Notice, Battlestar Galactica), who are both no strangers to twisty-smart sci-fi plotting. The series unfolds like a good novel, with finely crafted details and action that's often a slow burn. If you like science fiction that could change how you look at reality, Westworld is going to blow you away. But I won't lie. It's also going to give you nightmares.